CoreLogic and Amherst Holdings, LLC, have partnered to release the Agency Prepayment Analyzer, an online investment analysis tool announced this week. The analyzer intertwines CoreLogic's data with Amherst's analytics and forecasting to deliver prepayment risk trends for agency mortgage-backed securities.
[IMAGE]Designed for fixed-income investors, Agency Prepayment Analyzer tracks the rates at which residential mortgage loans are likely to prepay, either voluntarily or involuntarily due to refinancing, defaults, or sales â€" instances in which the GSEs require buybacks.
Prepayment risk is heightened in the current market amid increased default and low interest rates.
""Agency securities are among the most liquid and widely held fixed-income investments because they offer attractive yields and are implicitly backed by the U.S.
[COLUMN_BREAK]Government,"" said Laurie Goodman, senior managing director of Amherst Holdings. ""But the combination of historically low interest rates and unprecedentedly high default rates, which drive buyouts, create significant prepayment exposure.""
""Agency Prepayment Analyzer is the first affordable, accessible tool to help fixed income investors determine and mitigate both of these risks at the collateral, rather than pool level,"" Goodman added.
Agency Prepayment Analyzer offers a four-month forecast of prepayment rates accompanied by commentary from Goodman.
""Combining our resources with the unique insights from Laurie Goodman and Amherst introduces a new level of sophisticated analytics to the market,"" said George Livermore, group executive for data and analytics at California-based CoreLogic.
Investors benefit from CoreLogic's Loan Performance Servicing database, which observes more than 40 million mortgages, and the CoreLogic Home Price Index Valuation Engine. This data is used to estimate current LTV.
""Agency Prepayment Analyzer will expose the unparalleled scope and richness of CoreLogic data to a new set of fixed-income managers,"" said Livermore.
CoreLogic's data and Amherst's forecasts estimate for investors the prepayment risk inherent in agency-backed bonds, collateral mortgage obligations, and interest-only and principal-only strips.
Housing turnover, incentive programs, and prepayment volatility are also taken into account.